


Curiosity

by rapacityinblue



Series: Where They Never Say Your Name [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-05-16
Packaged: 2017-11-05 12:05:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rapacityinblue/pseuds/rapacityinblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Partner fic to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/406211">No Imagination</a>; an Eames-pov vignette that explores his relationship with Arthur and the years leading up to Inception. Worldbuilds for <a href="">Where They Never Say Your Name</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Curiosity

Eames has always liked people. When he was just a petty thief and forger (before the ‘f’ became capitalized), even as a young child, he’d liked people. Not personally, not as friends. Academically. Scientifically, even psychologically. He likes people. He’s curious. He wants to know about them -- not just their likes or dislikes, not their favorite color or who they like to fuck. It’s all superficial crap, it’s what they put out there for everyone to see. What Eames likes is the ‘why.’ Finding all the little pieces that put a person together. The bits underneath that make them make sense. 

The job isn’t the usual sort he takes; it’s more along the line where everyone gets to learn each other’s real name and there’s no risk of being hunted down at the end of it. But Dominic Cobb is supposed to be a brilliant architect, a master of extraction, which is why Eames takes the job. He has both the man and his wife sussed out in the first few minutes -- enough, at least, to do a cursory forgery of them if he had to. If it ever came to that. Good people. Good parents, good lovers. Exceedingly bland. But there’s enough there, under Dom’s gentle humor and his wife’s old-world courtesy, to keep Eames interested. Enough that he thinks they might be worth working with again. It could take two or three jobs to really comprehend those depths, map out all the subtleties of who they were beneath the surface. Maybe, he thinks, just as an occasional thing. 

And then he meets Arthur. 

“My point man,” Dom explains, his attention more on his model and barely on the extremely well coiffed young man behind him. “Best I’ve ever worked with. Arthur, we’ve found a Forger.” 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says, and Eames just knows, the way he knows people, that it makes him squirm to look past the unkempt hair and the wrinkled shirt and the clashing colors. To look past all that and still offer him a hand in friendship. It is, possibly, the last civil thing Arthur says to him. 

It’s certainly the last time Eames understands a thing about the man. 

He’s gotten good at this, dissecting a person to the core with just a few clean strokes. Maybe too good, because it seems now he’s gone complacent. Like a sommelier who has attended one too many tastings, and can’t be surprised by a wine any more. The flavors of the people he deals with have grown flat and expected. Cobb is, at best, a new vintage, differently aged but still too familiar. In Mal, occasionally, he’ll find an intriguing bottom note woven through what he already knows. But Arthur -- Arthur is a brand new variety of grape he’s never even fucking dreamed of. 

From the very first, it’s evident that Arthur is, in every way, his complete opposite. It’s not just the way they dress or go about their daily business. Arthur works exceptionally hard to make himself into background noise, and he does a wonderful job of it. Eames isn’t happy unless he’s taking the air out of the room. 

Point Man and Forger, they’re forced into exceptionally close quarters together, spending exponentially more hours every day comparing notes, analyzing the subject, examining his schedule. And with every detail they glean about him, Eames is writing his own dossier on the very slim man sitting across from him. He knows that Arthur speaks with an American accent but frequently uses British turns of phrase and speech patterns. He’s absolutely certain more than one of Arthur’s many suits are genuine Huntsman, just as he’s certain that the man still prefers Italian designers. He knows that Arthur won’t eat peanut butter. He knows that no matter how awfully Arthur is killed, he never even flinches when he comes up from the dream. He knows all these things -- and hasn’t a clue what any one of them means. They may have literally nothing in common. 

Maybe that’s why, no matter how many facts he collects about Arthur, he never seems to be able to piece them together into anything resembling the man. He’s almost certain it’s why Arthur can’t stand him.

And, if he had any doubts before, he knows now he’s gotten complacent, because it drives him mad. Every new revelation seems to splinter the complete picture further apart, and the longer he flounders the more frustrated he becomes. It makes him grind down on the toothpick between his lips. It makes him snappish, and overly harsh, and when Arthur offers him a sincere compliment on a particularly good catch, he cuts it off with a sarcastic dismissal. Arthur’s face goes, if possible, even more blank, and he returns to the files he’s collating, and there is no room for anything else between them. 

Arthur spends more hours training with the PASIV than any of them, but when they go under for test runs, he is always the dreamer. Arthur’s mind is a wonderful place to be anybody you wish. He flushes out the bones of Cobb’s mazes with plush tapestries and the most beautiful artwork, and Eames would have to be a fool not to appreciate the texture of raw silk against his inner wrist. But the longer he spends down there, working to sway Cobb (who is posing as the mark) into giving up his secrets without riling the projections surrounding them, the more he wonders what it would be like with Arthur as the subject. He floats the idea one day, as the excellently clothed young man kneels beside him to insert the IV. 

“Trust me, Mr. Eames,” Arthur assures him with what is somewhere between a smile and a smirk, “You don’t want to meet my subconscious.” 

In the moment before he goes under, Eames is utterly convinced that Arthur is right. And yet, undeniably, the curiosity is there.

* * *

The curiosity is always there. It’s what brings him back after each job ends, what keeps him hoping in the between-times that they might find a job that needs a Forger. If asked, he can say, with absolute honesty, that Mal is the best extractor he’s ever seen. In a dream, she is so many things all at once -- feminine and dangerous and tantalizing and motherly -- that their targets are often dying to confide in her before the job ever starts. There is absolutely no doubt in his mind that Cobb is a fabulous architect, building mazes that are intuitive to walk through but still manage to pin hostile projections away in far off corridors and blind corners. But what keeps him coming back is Arthur. Arthur, who takes Cobb’s plans and twists them just enough with that wonderful little brain of his, just enough that they are simultaneously gorgeous and impossible and the most perfect damn thing Eames has ever seen.

* * *

The curiosity is always there, but it cannot ever rival Eames’s tremendous sense of self worth. He has a very fine skin and every intention of keeping it for the foreseeable future, and so he doesn’t know what happened -- he doesn’t want to get involved -- when he hears Mal Cobb is dead. He goes on with his life, and waits until they have a job that needs a Forger. They do. Cobb finds him.

Any subtlety Dom once had is gone, now. His motives are written across him. If they were spelled out any clearer they’d be in neon. Eames sees the grief, pushing him almost to the edge of insanity, and he sees the desperate desire to return to his children. Eames prides himself on being very good at his work, and for now, he thinks maybe Dom isn’t too dangerous to work with.

It’s a different job than they’ve ever had before, not just because of the target and style. Not just because it’s suddenly on the side of the law Eames is much closer to. Arthur is different. His shoulders seem a little less straight under the perfectly tailored line of his suit coat, and his retorts come just enough slower, a little less sharp. When he puts Eames under, he almost smiles at him. Arthur still won’t let him have a single god damned hint to go on, but Eames knows he’d rather go under sitting straight up, not in a reclining chair, the same way he knows that Dom isn’t the only one mourning.   
They spend most of their days asleep. Working, yes, but while time spent under sedation is not as restful as... well, as actual rest, it still has the same physical effects on the body. It leaves them all with a lot of extra time and an an exponentially larger percentage of conscious thought. But Eames isn’t like Dom and Arthur, who work exclusively with extraction now. After all, it’s a very specialized field, and not every job requires a Forger. By now, counting all the time spent under (difficult to do, since dream-time is so flexible based on so many variables and he never did pay much attention to maths in school anyway) Eames estimates he’s lived what would be considered about three waking lifetimes. He’s sure that, for Arthur, it’s been much longer. 

He’s leaving the workshop late, later than he usually does, when some sense of civic duty combined with a much larger itch of restlessness curves his path toward the last remaining light left on. His hand stops, hovering just above the switch, as he takes in what he sees.

Eames never advises going under alone. He’s warned clients of it before, even the occasional co-worker, although his own self of sense preservation is usually strong enough to keep him off a job with anyone that stupid. He’s seen plenty of addicts in his various lines of work, and the PASIV has its share. But standing here now, with his hand poised above the light switch, it’s not Dom he sees in the chair, sitting straight up. It’s not Dom, who is mad five ways to Sunday by now, with his knees spread most suggestively open. It’s not Dom engaging in this incredibly dangerous act of whimsy. It’s Arthur. He’s dreaming alone, which is either the most terrifying or most arousing thing Eames has ever seen. 

Bloody curiosity. It’s the only reason Eames can think of to uncoil a second line and roll up his sleeve. 

He joins Arthur at the railing of Escher’s Waterval, directly across from the heart of the paradox. In Arthur’s dream, the falls aren’t just an idea frozen in ink. The water crashes over the wheel, turning it, before flowing into the channel to ascend against gravity. 

“Penrose again?” He knows Arthur’s fondness for the steps, although he doesn’t know why Arthur calls them steps, as the British do, and not stairs, like an American. 

“It is a classic.” Arthur can manage to agree without committing to anything, a skill which Eames finds as intriguing as it is frustrating. “What are you doing here, Eames?” 

The dream is limited twice, by the confines of Escher’s print and again by the paradox. Eames considers expanding the dream but dismisses the notion. The dream is also completely devoid of projections, in contrast to to Escher’s original. “No washer woman?” 

He thinks sometimes he surprises Arthur with the extent, or maybe the eclecticity, of his knowledge. But Arthur gives no more indication than resting his fingertips in the pockets of his excellently tailored trousers, his arms folded into an acute angle. In a second, there she is, hanging her laundry out to dry on the next lowest rooftop. Eames clears his throat uncomfortably, looking next to their three. There’s a man there, sure enough, but he’s not admiring the rather sickening backflow of the water. He’s staring at them. No, he’s staring at Eames. Eames, who has been in unfriendly subconsciouses before, but never felt something quite like this.   
Arthur clears his throat, not ostentatiously, and tilts his head the opposite direction. Eames follows the motion to higher window, from which the mirror of the projection stares down at them. Not glaring at them -- not yet, any way. Just watching, without animosity, without prejudice, without _anything._

“You know,” he tells Arthur, “you’re just taking license now. You can’t ever see that figure clearly in the print. It’s a two-dimensional reflection.” 

“I did say you wouldn’t like my subconscious,” Arthur agrees over the first strains of _La Vie En Rose_. He’s always on something of a modernist kick, though why he’s chosen Edith Piaf for his most recent obsession, Eames will never know, any more than he’ll ever know where Arthur learned to weight a die. Now it’s just gotten trite, and as the music swells, Eames tells him so. 

The next time they work together, Arthur is using a different Piaf track to synchronize kicks.

* * *

It’s that damn curiosity again, and his own damn ego, which have him convinced that he’ll be able to spot any real instability before Dom puts either of them in an unacceptable amount of danger. Not that he thinks he’ll be able to pry Arthur away at that point, because if there’s one thing he’s sure of it’s that Arthur will never abandon his partner. But still, he’s convinced that he’ll know, and it’s his own damn ego that gets him into the Fischer job, and then there he is being shot at. He’s rather put out about the whole thing, even as he’s thrilled by the challenge to his abilities. 

And there’s the fact that for this moment, in the warehouse, they’re completely united. To the point of finishing each other’s sentences, which would be cute if it it weren’t so damn cute. And if they weren’t being shot at. Before, he thought maybe this all was worth it for the look on Arthur’s face when he realized he’d been dressed to match Fischer’s projection of a cab driver (the exceptional tailoring was all his own, of course) but this moment could be almost as good. If they weren’t being shot at. 

He tells himself he’ll stay on the first level regardless of what Cobb says. After all, better to survive a week than ten years deeper, with security dogging them every step of the way. But the next level down is Arthur’s, and he can’t not go. Can’t miss a chance to glean just one iota more of understanding about the man. And then Arthur is putting him under, and there’s something about the teasing lilt in those flat vowels that makes him forget to protest, and then Ariadne’s painstakingly constructed hospital is tossed into the wind and they’re tearing around his brain like it’s some madcap criminal’s convention in bloody Aspen, and by the end of it there’s one eighth of another lifetime capped onto his total, but he wouldn’t have missed it. 

It’s the funniest thing about the human brain -- any strong emotion, even happiness, it can’t hold on to. Oh, it can remember being happy, but that actual feeling, the joy that was there in the moment, is gone forever. It’s the same with pain. There’s no pathway formed that can relate the memory. It’s why the jobs they do work, really. Even a mind like Fischer’s -- aware of extraction, trained against it -- rejects the idea of someone else’s dream. It blurs away the faces the subject shouldn’t know, softens the edges until everything fits together in that half-remembered feel dreams have, and events can be recounted but exactly what they meant, how they felt, that part is gone forever. At the baggage claim, Eames realizes (while he waits for Ariadne, lovely girl that she is, to move her bloody luggage trolley out of his way) that maybe it’s not entirely unlike Arthur. All the facts, divorced from the emotion. He’s pleased enough with that realization to smile all the way out to the cab, where he notices with some bemusement that the driver really is wearing a brown leather jacket.

He expects to settle in with his bundles of cash and wait for the next really interesting job to come his way. Cobb is retired now, which Eames thinks is wonderful and also doesn’t believe for a minute, but he’ll wait for the man to figure it out on his own. He fills the time seeing how fast he can gamble away his money, and there’s always a small forgery needing to be done to get him by in the interim. But the job comes sooner than he expects, and the offer isn’t from Dom. 

“In and out in under an hour,” Arthur tells him over espressos in Nice. “The subject’s never even heard of dream sharing or extraction. He’s got absolutely no training.” 

“That’s what you said about Fischer,” Eames reminds him drolly, but the figure Arthur names does make him whistle. “Divided by whom?” Eames asks.

“A four man team. Ariadne’s going to build for us, but she won’t be going under. I’ve got a chemist I worked with before in Tokyo. I’ll dream, you extract,” Arthur says.

It takes Eames all of thirty seconds to decide he’s in, but he draws it out for the hell of it because one of the few things he knows how to do is make Arthur to squirm and it would be a shame not to put that knowledge to good use. He taps his fingers against the tiny mug. “I’m not an extractor, am I?” he reminds the other man, and Arthur leans forward. 

“That’s the beauty of it. There’s no vault we need to break into. The subject’s already been caught more than once getting chatty during pillow talk. He likes being impressive. If we build this dream right, he’ll be tripping over himself to tell you what we need.” Arthur gives him a hard, unreadable look, one eyebrow up. “Don’t pretend you don’t like the seduction, Eames.” 

Eames laughs outright. “Alright. But darling, you have to promise you’ll let me wake up to something recorded in the last decade.”

It’s the damn curiosity that gets him every time.


End file.
